Teachers’ Use of Display vs. Referential Questions

With the growing interest in interaction in communicative language teaching, interactive features of classroom have gained more prominence. Questions as an important technique used by the teacher to promote classroom interaction have an important say in the matter. In this study the researchers investigated the frequency of use of two types of questions, that is, display and referential questions, at three levels of proficiency (elementary, intermediate and advanced). Furthermore, their interaction effect were compared within each level to see which question type led to the desirable effect, that is, more interaction at each level. To this end, one class from each level (elementary, intermediate, and advanced) which was taught by the same teacher was observed during a semester. The results showed that the teacher used more display questions at the elementary and intermediate levels contrary to the advanced level. Furthermore, the results elicited from the dependent t-test indicated that there was a significant difference in the effect of display versus referential questions at all of the three levels with referential ones leading to longer responses.